pivotallabs.com Archives - 14 March 2013, Thursday

Pivotal Labs is a recognized leader in agile software development practices. We build consumer and enterprise web and mobile applications for global clients. We are currently looking for experienced, creative designers to join our team and help us continue to innovate in the field. We...

Pivotal Tracker lets you stay on top of everything to do with your project, but sometimes your stories need a little something extra. Fortunately when some of our customers feel that way, they share the results. Here’s a roundup of recent test related Third Party Tools to help you mak...

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This is the second part in a series I’m writing about lessons that can be learned from functional programming. Find the first part here . Object Oriented Programming (OOP) as an idea has been oversold. The most commonly used languages in use today are designed around the idea of OOP. ...

Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic, auto-immune disease that requires constant monitoring and treatment adjustments. To fill an unmet need among patients and physicians managing RA, Crescendo Bioscience prototyped an app that would track daily conditions in hopes of facilitating better...

We’ve just released version 1.6.1 of the Pivotal Tracker iOS app , which includes fixes for a number of text input problems. Most importantly, it fixes Romaji input for Japanese users. While we don’t officially support non-English localizations, we try our best to allow Tracker to be ...

As we recently wrote , 2013 will see major improvements to Pivotal Tracker , on a rebuilt foundation (including a brand new API), followed by major new features and an updated design. We can’t wait to get all this into your hands quickly, and continuously improve Tracker based on your...

Tracker Tracker is an open source web app that allows you to see and work with stories from across multiple projects in one Kanban style view, with search and filtering. That’s huge. We have nothing else to say on the matter really. For anyone juggling multiple projects in Pivotal Tra...

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If you’re headed to Austin for SXSW join us at Adaptive Path on Sunday March 10th at 7pm for deLUX, the lean user experience party. There’ll be food and drink aplenty, and lots of great conversation. We’ll have a short speaker program featuring: Jon Berger , Pivotal Labs Jeff Gothelf ...

Today we’ve released Pivotal Tracker for iOS 1.6 to the App Store . With this release we’ve thoroughly refined the app to make updating stories easier and more enjoyable. While there are all kinds of refinements, we think you’ll be most excited about the following: All text can now be...

I woke up in the mid morning to a heavily blinded room and crept outside hoping not to wake anyone. I fumbled along the walls in a corridor of a foreign house grasping for a lightswitch which always tends to be lower in these old Sydney houses, but instead my toe found a corner. Minut...

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It’s critical that stories are accepted as soon as possible after they are delivered. Is the project manager unable to accept stores as they are delivered, so they don’t get credited in the iteration where they started? You can backdate acceptance to reflect when the stories were read...

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January has gone by quickly! Hopefully the new year is already off to a great start for you and your entire team. I’d like to share what we’ve been up to recently, and give you a preview of what to expect in 2013. The Big Picture To put our plans in context, it’s important to understa...

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With all these APIs floating around don’t you sometimes wish that apps would just talk to each other and keep us humans out of it. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting close with CloudWork . It’s so straightforward I feel it’s something the Hulk might say – “Cloud Work!, Hulk no Sma...

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Pivotal Labs: We Transform Ideas into Software. As a recognized leader in highly disciplined agile software development practices, Pivotal Labs has been building high reliability software for over 20 years. We build consumer and enterprise web and mobile applications for global client...

This is the first in a series of short posts explaining what Cucumber is and isn’t. Used correctly, Cucumber can be a tool for great good. Used poorly, it’s an invitation to disaster. KNOW YOUR TOOLS. I’ve been cuking for nearly as long as cuking has been possible. I’ve made every mis...

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There is an interesting article by Swizec Teller over at Business Insider talking about why programmers do their best work late at night. This is not the case at Pivotal. Generally when we have clients committing code late at night, the team ends up having to refactor it and get tests...

We’ll come to ElementalJS a little later but first I wanted to describe the problem it’s trying to solve. The problem with current Javascript design patterns There seems to be two mainstream ways of building Javascript applications: DOM event listeners with callback spaghetti or full ...

Luis Lavena says:Agree, there is no good reason for that. I believe the argument is associated with packaged gems (vendor/cache) bundled with your application. The other is incorrect versioning (having a Windows gem like 1.2.1.1 while the non-Windows is 1.2.1) I’m still pinging them t...

Patrick Vlaskovits addresses some fallacies around customer development and describes multiple approaches on how to hack "Getting Out of The Building" such that product development decisions can be made with better, higher-quality data.

It's not that designers and developers don't or can't get along. What the team at Redline realized is that they speak a different language. So to facilitate the communication between these two life forms they created this tool It's simple to set up, simple to use and simple to incorpo...

I recently wanted to make it easier for contributors to ActiveHash to test their changes against multiple versions of Rails, with multiple versions of Ruby. My stories looked like this: As a contributor I want to be able to run `bundle install`, then quickly run the suite spec suite a...

Ultimately the goal is to go to a treadmill desk (for reasons outlined here ), but before sinking the money and effort into that endeavor, I'd been meaning to try out a standing desk. It was never really a priority and I was working at a client-site (which inhibited my ability to requ...

(Due credit to Trung Lê 's article on which all this is based) We recently moved our project's CI from a TeamCity server onto Travis CI's new private CI-as-a-service program. We compared several other hosted CI services and found Travis to be the easiest to use, and with the help of T...

Two weeks ago, JRuby 1.7.0 was officially released. Here are a few reasons why you might want to upgrade: Bug fixes JRuby 1.7.0 fixes many compatibility issues with ruby 1.9. Also, JRuby 1.6.8 is no longer being maintained so fixes from 1.7.0 are not getting backported. Support for in...

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An easel. A marker. Sometimes the most effective and immediate way to capture thoughts and collaborate is also the most tactile, visual, and simple. But easels and markers have their limitations: information is difficult to digitally preserve, and they don’t scale to large teams. In 2...

I've been working with my client, Unpakt , for a while now. One of their core values is making people's lives easier. They're specifically focused on making it easy for people moving to a new home or office to find a mover, compare prices and book their move online. As a development t...

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I'm really excited about a collection of new techniques I've been experimenting with over the past few weeks. They're an evolution of the in-browser design approaches I've been using for the past few years, and taken together they help my team build better designs with less waste in a...